If it’s a good year and I can shoot a limit, I’m gonna shoot a limit. Hunting is the point of hunting, after all. We weather the bad years so we may earn the good ones.
But sometimes it’s what we do with the birds after we kill them that gets us into trouble.
If you’re a reader of this column you know I’m not a fan of tailgate shots. If you’re not a regular reader or just don’t know what a tailgate shot is, it’s a photo of a mess of dead birds piled high on the tailgate after a hunt.
Full confession: if you drill down on my social media pages you’ll find a few tailgate shots of my own, though not many as I’m not that good of a hunter. These days, I try to balance those shots with photos or videos of cooked birds to provide a proper balance.
Tailgate shots are primarily a bird-hunting thing. Big game is usually one beaming hunter with a dead deer or elk, often showing off a nice set of antlers. The animals are sometimes displayed from the back of a pickup, but I prefer these shots to be taken in the environment before the animal has been field dressed. It helps to be strategic about positioning. Minimizing blood or other carnage in the photo is a good idea.
I’ve seen big game photos I’m offended by, but this is generally because the hunter has posed over the animal in some way that’s intended to demonstrate dominance over the game the hunter has killed.
Taking an appropriately respectful photo of a hunter and the hunter’s trophy is an important part of memorializing the hunt, however. It’s part of a hunter’s ritual honoring the wild game we love.
But gratuitous displays of dead birds remain a staple for many upland and waterfowl hunters. I’ve made it my cause to shame public displays of avian carnage, hopefully out of existence.
Last week a photo made the rounds showing how good hunting can be if you’re willing to work hard and the weather gods cooperate with lots of rain. This tailgate shot included nearly 100 chukars and another 20 or so Huns. It was the result of five guys hunting some unidentified place in the Great Basin.
The poster explained that they weren’t pen-raised birds and the tailgate did appear to be presented in the appropriate sagebrush habitat. The poster also explained the dead birds were the result of three days of hunting so all had stayed within legal limits.
So what’s the fuss? Can’t a few guys enjoy the fruits of their labor? If they’re putting in the miles and the habitat is producing surplus birds, who are we to spoil their fun?
I’m not going to say don’t spend three days killing limits. That’s what seasons like this are for. But for the sake of our collective hunting future, please skip the tailgate shot. Stacking dead birds up like cordwood introduces a sordid element of commoditization to the hunt. Wild game birds are not a product and we should never present them as such.
And sharing those photos means they are likely to fall in the wrong hands, to be used as propaganda by antis hoping to turn otherwise ambivalent members of the non-hunting public against our sport.
You can’t expect suburban folks with little or no exposure to the natural world to understand that upland game bird populations follow a perpetual cycle of boom and bust, fueled primarily by weather. Five guys with three-day limits isn’t going to affect the long-term survival of chukar one bit in seasons like this. Drought kills more birds than human hunters ever will.
So enjoy yourself, and when weather and conditions allow it, kill and eat a limit or two. Just be thoughtful about how you use your camera.